| In recent years, Third-World militarization has become a hallmark of the international order. This build-up has been marked by the proliferation of "advanced," high-technology weaponry in the "developing" world. Well-equipped "state of the art" militaries are no longer restricted to the industrialized "core" powers; military development and economic development, it seems, have become decoupled.;This dissertation investigates this rapid militarization by identifying and examining factors affecting the adoption of a variety of force structures (e.g. an independent air force) and weapons systems (e.g supersonic aircraft, main battle tanks) by nation-states in the 1945-1990 period. Three broad arguments are taken from the literature in efforts to understand this trend: superpower manipulation, national security, and internal political process arguments. This dissertation adds and emphasizes ideas drawn from institutional theory to develop arguments emphasizing the impact of world-level cultural models of the nation-state on the proliferation process. I argue that weapons spread, not solely because of a match between their technical capabilities and national security needs, but because of the highly symbolic, normative nature of militaries and their weaponry. Weapons spread, in part, because highly technological militaries symbolize modernity, efficacy, and independence.;The empirical portion of the dissertation is made up of two parts. The first develops panel regressions, using national weapons inventory data as dependent variables for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. This analysis is supplemented by logistic regressions using indicators of force structure as dependent variables, and by an exploratory event history analysis. The second empirical portion of the dissertation is a series of case studies, designed to explore the mechanisms through which membership in the world system translates into weapons inventories. The primary case examines overall patterns of weapons procurement, and their relationship to regional patterns of conflict in Latin America.;These analyses conclude that institutional arguments provide substantial insights into the process of weapons proliferation. The results of this research demonstrate that the more a nation interacts with the larger world cultural system, the more it visibly asserts and confirms its sovereign status with the ultimate symbol of nationhood: a military. |
